


The Fault In Our Creampuffs

by alltimesamx



Category: Carmilla (Web Series), Carmilla - J. Sheridan Le Fanu
Genre: F/F
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-06-12
Updated: 2015-06-12
Packaged: 2018-04-04 00:16:33
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,230
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4119706
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/alltimesamx/pseuds/alltimesamx
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>So I did this about a month ago before going to work one day. You have been warned.<br/>SORRY GUYS.</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Fault In Our Creampuffs

**Author's Note:**

> Follow me on twitter @carmillaaddict

Late in the winter of my seventeenth year, my father decided I was depressed, presumably because I rarely left the house, spent quite a lot of time in bed, read the same book over and over, ate infrequently, and devoted quite a bit of my abundant free time to thinking about death.  
Whenever you read a cancer booklet or website or whatever, they always list depression among the side effects of cancer. But, in fact, depression is not a side of cancer. Depression is a side effect of dying. (Cancer is also a side effect of dying. Almost everything is, really.) But my dad believed I required treatment, so he took me to see my Regular Doctor Jim, who agreed that I was veritably swimming in a paralyzing and totally clinical depression, and that therefore my meds should be adjusted and also I should attend a weekly Support Group.  
This Support Group featured a rotating cast of characters in various states of tumor-driven unwellness. Why did the cast rotate? A side effect of dying.  
The Support Group, of course, was depressing as hell. It met every Wednesday in the basement of a stone walled Episcopal church shaped like a cross, where the two boards would have met, where the heart of Jesus would have been.  
I noticed this because Perry, the Support Group leader and the only person over eighteen in the room, talked about the heart of Jesus every freaking meeting, all about how we, as young cancer survivors, were sitting right in Christ’s very sacred heart and whatever.  
So here’s how it went in God’s heart: The six or seven or ten of us walked/wheeled in, grazed at a decrepit selection of cookies and grape soda, sat down in the Circle of Trust, and listened to Perry recount for the thousandth time her depressingly miserable life story—how she had cancer in unnamed places and they thought she was going to die but she didn’t die and now here she is, a full-grown adult in a church basement in the 137th nicest city in America, divorced, addicted to cleaning, mostly friendless, eking out a meager living by exploiting her cancertastic past, slowly working her way toward a master’s degree that will not improve her career prospects, waiting, as we all do, for the sword of Damocles to give her the relief that she escaped lo those many years ago when cancer took unnamed body parts but spared what only the most generous soul would call her life.  
AND YOU TOO MIGHT BE SO LUCKY!  
Then we introduced ourselves: Name. Age. Diagnosis. And how we’re doing today. I’m Laura, I’d say when they’d get to me. Sixteen. Thyroid originally but with an impress and long-settled satellite colony in my lungs. And I’m doing okay.  
Once we got around the circle, Perry always asked if anyone wanted to share. And then began the circle of jerk support: everyone talking about fighting and battling and winning and shrinking and scanning. To be fair to Perry, she let us talk about dying, too. But most of them weren’t dying. Most would live into adulthood, as Perry had.  
(Which meant there was quite a lot of competitiveness about it, with everybody wanting to beat not only cancer itself, but also the other people in the room. Like, I realize that this is irrational, but when they tell you that you have, say, a 20 percent chance of living five years, the math kicks in and you figure out that’s one in five….so you look around and think, as any healthy person would: I gotta outlast four of these bastards.)  
The only redeeming facet of Support Group was this kid named Susan, or as they liked to be called, LaFontaine (they also preferred gender neutral pronouns), who was round-faced, short, and had red hair swept over one eye.  
And their eyes weren’t the problem. They had some fantastically improbable eye cancer. One eye had been cut out when they were a kid, and now they wore the kind of thick glasses that made their eyes (both the real one and the glass one) preternaturally huge, like their whole head was basically just this fake eye and this real eye staring at you. From what I could gather on the rare occasions when LaF shared with the group, a recurrence had placed their remaining eye in mortal peril.  
LaF and I communicated exclusively through sighs. Each time someone discussed anticancer diets or snorting ground-up shark fin or whatever, he’d glance over at me and sigh ever so slightly. I’d shake my hand microscopically and exhale in response.

So Support Group blew, and after a few weeks, I grew to be rather kicking-and-screaming about the whole affair. In fact, on the Wednesday I made acquaintance of Carmilla Karnstein, I tried my level best to get out of Support Group while sitting on the couch with my dad in the third leg of a twelve-hour marathon of the previous season’s Doctor Who, which admittedly I had already seen, but still.  
Me: “I refuse to attend Support Group.”  
Dad: “One of the symptoms of depression is disinterest in activities.”  
Me: “Please just let me watch Doctor Who. It’s an activity.”  
Dad: “Television is a passivity.”  
Me: “Ugh, Dad, please.”  
Dad: “Laura, you’re a teenager. You’re not a little kid anymore. You need to make friends, get out of the house, and live your life.”  
Me: “If you want me to be a teenager, don’t send me to Support Group. Buy me a fake ID so I can go to clubs, drink vodka, and take pot.”  
Dad: “You don’t take pot, for starters.”  
Me: “See, that’s the kind of thing I’d know if you got me a fake ID.”  
Dad: “You’re going to Support Group.”  
Me: “UGGGGGGGGGGG.”  
Dad: “Laura, you deserve a life.”  
That shut me up, although I failed to see how attendance at Support Group met the definition of life. Still, I agreed to go—after negotiating the right to record the 1.5 episodes of Doctor Who I’d be missing.  
I went to Support Group for the same reason that I’d once allowed nurses with a mere eighteen months of graduate education to poison me with exotically named chemicals: I wanted to make my dad happy. There is only one thing in this world shittier than biting it from cancer when you’re sixteen, and that’s having a kid who bites it from cancer.

Dad pulled into the circular driveway behind the church at 4:56. I pretended to fiddle with my oxygen tank for a second just to kill time.  
“Do you want me to carry it in for you?”  
“No, it’s fine.” I said. The cylindrical green tank only weighed a few pounds, and I had this little steel cart to wheel it around behind me. It delivered two liters of oxygen to me each minute through a cannula, a transparent tube that split just beneath my neck, wrapped behind my ears, and then reunited behind my nostrils. The contraption was necessary because my lungs sucked at being lungs.  
“I love you,” he said as I got out.  
“You too, Dad. See you at six.”  
“Make friends!” he said through the rolled-down window as I walked away.  
I didn’t want to take the elevator because taking the elevator is a Last Days kind of activity at Support Group, so I took the stairs. I grabbed a cookie and a can of grape soda and then turned around.  
A girl was staring at me.  
I was quite sure I’d never seen her before. Long and leanly muscular, she dwarfed the molded plastic elementary school chair she was sitting on. Black hair, curly and long. She looked my age, maybe a year older, and she sat with her tailbone against the edge of the chair, her posture aggressively poor, one hand half in a pocket of leather pants.  
I looked away, suddenly conscious of my myriad insufficiencies. I was wearing old high waisted jeans, which had once been tight but now sagged in weird places, and a yellow t-shirt advertising a band that I didn’t even like anymore. And my hair: I had long hair, and I hadn’t even bothered to, like, brush it. Furthermore, I had ridiculously fat chipmunked cheeks, a side effect of treatment. I looked like a normally proportioned person with a balloon for a head. This was not even to mention the cankle situation. And yet—I cut a glance to her, and her eyes were still on me.  
It occurred to me why they call it eye contact.  
I walked into the circle and sat down next to LaF, two seats away from the girl. I glanced again. She was still watching me.  
Look, let me just say it: She was hot. A guy stares at you relentlessly and it is, at best, awkward and, at worst, a form of assault. But a hot girl….well.  
I pulled out my phone (a flip phone, because my dad was paranoid about iPhones) and clicked the button on the side so it would display the time: 4:59. The circle filled in with the unlucky twelve-to-eighteens, and then Patrick started us out with the serenity prayer: God, grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, the courage to change the things I can, and the wisdom to know the difference. The girl was still staring at me. I felt rather blushy.  
Finally, I decided that the proper strategy was to stare back. Girls do not have the monopoly on the Staring Business, after all. So I looked her over as Perry acknowledged for the thousandth time his cancer etc., and soon it was a staring contest. After a while the girl smiled, and then finally her brown eyes glanced away. When she looked back at me, I flicked my eyebrows up to say, I win.  
She shrugged. Perry continued and then finally it was time for the introductions. “Susan, perhaps you’d like to go first today. I know you’re facing a challenging time.”  
“Yeah.” LaF said. “I’m LaFontaine. I’m seventeen. And it’s looking like I have to get surgery in a couple weeks, after which I’ll be blind. Not to complain or anything because I know a lot of us have it worse, but yeah, I mean, being blind does sort of suck. My girlfriend helps, though. And friends like Carmilla.” They nodded toward the girl, who now had a name. “So, yeah,” LaF continued. They were looking at their hands, which they’d folded into each other like the top of a tepee. “There’s nothing you can do about it.”  
“We’re here for you, LaFontaine.” Perry said. “Let LaF hear it, guys.” And then we all, in monotone, said, “We’re here for you, LaFontaine.”  
Michael was next. He was twelve. He had leukemia. He’d always had leukemia. He was okay. (Or so he said. He’d taken the elevator.)  
Elsie was sixteen, and pretty enough to be the object of the hot girl’s eyes. She was a regular—in a long remission from appendiceal cancer, which I had not previously known existed. She said—as she had every other time I’d attended Support Group—that she felt strong, which felt like bragging to me as the oxygen-drizzling nubs tickled my nostrils.  
There were five others before they got to her. She smiled a little when her turn came. Her voice was low, smoky, and dead sexy. “My name is Carmilla Karnstein.” she said. “I’m seventeen. I had a little touch of osteosarcoma a year and a half ago, but I’m just here today at LaF’s request.”  
“And how are you feeling?” asked Perry.  
“Oh, I’m grand.” Carmilla Karnstein smiled with a corner of her mouth. “I’m on a roller coaster that only goes up, my friend.”  
When it was my turn, I said, “My name is Laura. I’m sixteen. Thyroid with mets in my lungs. I’m okay.”  
The hour proceeded apace: Fights were recounted, battles won amid wars sure to be lost; hope was clung to; families were both celebrated and denounced; it was agreed that friends just didn’t get it; tears were shed; comfort proffered. Neither Carmilla Karnstein and I spoke again until Perry said, “Carmilla, perhaps you’d like to share your fears with the group.”  
“My fears?”  
“Yes.”  
“I fear oblivion.” she said without a moment’s pause. “I feel it like the proverbial blind man who’s afraid of the dark.”  
“Too soon,” LaF said, cracking a smile.  
“Was that insensitive?” Carmilla asked. “I can be pretty blind to other people’s feelings.”  
LaFontaine was laughing, but Perry raised a chastening finger and said, “Carmilla, please. Let’s return to you and your struggles. You said you fear oblivion?”  
“I did.” Carmilla answered.  
Perry seemed lost. “Would, uh, would anyone like to speak tot hat?”  
I hadn’t been in proper school in three years. My Dad was my best friend. My second best friend was an author who did not know I existed. I was a fairly shy person—not the hand-raising type.  
And yet, just this once, I decided to speak. I half-raised my hand and Perry, her delightful evident, immediately said, “Laura!” I was, I’m sure she assumed, opening up. Becoming Part Of The Group.  
I looked over at Carmilla Karnstein, who looked back at me. You could almost see through her eyes they were so brown. “There will come a time,” I said, “when all of us are dead. All of us. There will come a time when there are no human beings remaining to remember that anyone ever existed or that our species ever did anything. There will be no one left to remember Aristotle or Cleopatra, let alone you. Everything that we did and built and wrote and thought and discovered will be forgotten and all of this”—I gestured encompassingly—“will have been for naught. Maybe that time is coming soon and maybe that is millions of years away, but even if we survive the collapse of our sun, we will not survive forever. There was a time before organisms experienced consciousness, and there will be a time after. And if the inevitability of human oblivion worries you, I encourage you to ignore it. God knows that’s what everyone else does.”  
I’d learned this from my aforementioned second best friend, John Green, the reclusive author of Looking For Alaska, the book that was as a close a thing I had to a Bible. John Green was the only person I’d ever come across who seemed to (a) understand what it’s like to be dying, and (b) not have died.  
After I finished, there was quite a long period of silemce as I watched a smile spread all the way across Carmilla’s face—not the little crooked smile of the girl trying to be sexy while she stared at me, but her real smile, too big for her face. “Goddamn.” Carmilla said quietly. “Aren’t you something else.”  
Neither of us said anything for the rest of Support Group. At the end, we all had to hold hands, and Perry led us in a prayer. “Lord Jesus Christ, we are gathered here in Your heart, literally in Your Heart, as cancer survivors. Guide us to life and the Light through our times of trial. We pray for LaFontaine’s eyes, for Michael’s and Jamie’s blood, for Carmilla’s bones, for Laura’s lungs, and for James’s throat. We pray that You might heal us and that we might feel Your love, Your peace, which passes all understanding. And we remember in our hearts those whom we knew and loved who have gone home to you: Maria and Kade and Joseph and Haley and Abigail and Angelina and Taylor and Garbiel and….”  
It was a long list. The world contains a lot of dead people. And while Perry droned on, reading the list from a sheet of paper because it was too long to memorize, I kept my eyes closed, trying to think prayerfully but mostly imagining the day when my name would find its way onto that list, all the way at the end when everyone had stopped listening.  
When Perry was finished, we said this stupid mantra together—LIVING OUR BEST LIFE TODAY—and it was over. Carmilla Karnstein pushed herself out of her chair and walked over to me. Her gait was crooked like her smile. She towered over me, but she kept her distance so I wouldn’t have to crane my neck to look her in the eye. “What’s your name?” she asked.  
“Laura.”  
“No, your full name.”  
“Um, Laura Grace Hollis.” She was just about to say something else when LaFontaine walked up. “Hold on,” Carmilla said, raising a finger, and turned to LaFontaine. “That was actually worse than you made it out to be.”  
“I told you it was bleak.”  
“Why do you bother with it.”  
“I don’t know. It kind of helps?”  
Carmilla leaned in so she thought I couldn’t hear. “She’s a regular?” I couldn’t hear LaF’s comment, but Carmilla responded, “I’ll say.” She clasped LaFontaine by both shoulders and then took a half step away from them. “Tell Laura about the clinic.”  
LaF leaned a hand against the snack table and focused their huge eye on me. “Okay, so I went to the clinic this morning, and I was telling my surgeon that I’d rather be deaf than blind. And he said, ‘It doesn’t work that way,’ and I was like, ‘Yeah, I realize it doesn’t work that way; I’m just saying I’d rather be deaf than blind if I had the choice, which I realize I don’t have,’ and he said, ‘Well, the good news is that you won’t be deaf,’ and I was like, ‘Thank you for explaining to me that my eye cancer isn’t going to make deaf. I feel so fortunate that an intellectual giant like yourself would deign to operate on me.’”  
“He sounds like a winner.” I said. “I’m gonna try to get some eye cancer just so I can make this guy’s acquaintance.”  
“Good luck with that. All right, I should go. J.P.’s waiting for me. I gotta look at him hot while I can.”  
“Counterinsurgence tomorrow?” Carmilla asked.  
“Definitely.” LaF turned and ran up the stairs, taking them two at a time.  
Carmilla Karnstein turned to me. “Literally.” she said.  
“Literally?” I asked.  
“We are literally in the heart of Jesus.” she said. “I thought we were in a church basement, but we are literally in the heart of Jesus.”  
“Someone should tell Jesus.” I said. “I mean, it’s gotta be dangerous, storing children with cancer in your heart.”  
“I would tell Him myself,” Carmilla said. “but unfortunately I am literally stuck inside His heart, so He won’t be able to hear me.” I laughed. She shook her head, just looking at me.  
“What?” I asked.  
“Nothing.” she said.  
“Why are you looking at me like that?”  
Carmilla half smiled. “Because you’re beautiful. I enjoy looking at beautiful people, and I decided a while ago not to deny myself the simper pleasures of existence.” A brief awkward silence ensued. Carmilla plowed through: “I mean, particularly given that, as you so deliciously pointed out, all of this will end in oblivion and everything.”  
I kind of scoffed or sighed or exhaled in a way that was vaguely coughy and then said, “I’m not beau—“  
“You’re like a millennial Piper Perabo. Like Imagine Me & You Piper Perabo.”  
“Never seen it.” I said.  
“Really?” she asked. “Pixie-haired gorgeous girl dislikes breaking rules but can’t help but fall for a girl she knows is trouble. It’s your autobiography, as far as I can tell.”  
Her every syllable flirted. Honestly, it kind of turned me on. I didn’t even know that girls could turn me on—not, like, in real life.  
A younger girl walked past us. “How’s it going, Alisa?” she asked. She smiled and mumbled, “Hi, Carmilla.” “Memorial people.” she explained. Memorial was the big research hospital. “Where do you go?”  
“Children’s.” I said, my voice smaller than I expected it to be. She nodded. The conversation seemed over. “Well,” I said, nodding vaguely toward the steps that led us out of the Literal Heart of Jesus. I titled my cart onto its wheels and started walking. She limped beside me. “So, see you next time, maybe?” I asked.  
“You should see it,” she said. “Imagine Me & You, I mean.”  
“Okay,” I said. “I’ll look it up.”  
“No. With Me. At my house,” she said. “Now.”  
I stopped walking. “I hardly know you, Carmilla Karnstien. You could be an ax murderer.”  
She nodded. “True enough, sweetheart.” she walked past me, her shoulders filling out her black t-shirt, her back straight, her steps lifting just slightly to the right as she walked steady and confident on what I had determined was a prosthetic leg. Osteosarcoma sometimes takes a limb to check you out. Then, if it likes you, it takes the rest.  
I followed her upstairs, losing ground as I made my way up slowly, stairs not being a field of expertise for my lungs.  
And then we were out of Jesus’s heart and in the parking lot, the spring air just on the cold side of perfect, the late-afternoon light heavenly in its hurtfulness.  
Dad wasn’t there yet, which was unusual, because Dad was almost always waiting for me. I glanced around and saw that a tall guy with brown hair had LaF pinned against the stone wall of the church, kissing them rather aggressively. They were close enough that I could hear the weird noises of their mouths being pressed together, and I could hear them saying “Always,” and him saying, “Always,” in return.  
Suddenly standing next to me, Carmilla half-whispered, “They’re big believers in PDA.”  
“What’s with the ‘always’?” The slurping sounds intensified.  
“Always is their thing. They’ll always love each other and whatever. I would conservatively estimate they have texted each other the word always four million times in the last year.”  
A couple more cars drove up, taking Michael and Alisa away. It was just Carmilla and me now, watching LaF and J.P., who proceeded apace as if they were not leaning against a place of worship.  
“Imagine taking that last drive to the hospital.” I said quietly. “The last time you’ll ever drive a car.”  
Without looking over at me, Carmilla said, “You’re killing my vibe here, cupcake. I’m trying to observe young love in its many-splendored awkwardness.”  
“I think he’s hurting their boob.” I said.  
“Yes, it’s difficult to ascertain whether he is trying to arouse her or perform a breast exam.” Then Carmilla Karnstein reached into her pocker and pulled out, of all things, a pack of cigarettes. She flipped it open and put a cigarette between her lips.  
“Are you serious?” I asked. “You think that’s cool? Oh, my God, you just ruined the whole thing.”  
“Which whole thing?” she asked, turning to me. The cigarette dangled unlit from the unsmiling corner of her mouth.  
“The whole thing where a girl who is not unattractive or unintelligent or seemingly in any way unacceptable stares at me and points out incorrect uses of literality and compares me to actresses and asks me to watch a movie at her house. But of course there is always a hamartia and yours is that, oh, my God, even though you HAD FREAKING CANCER you give money to a company in exchange for the chance to acquire YET MORE CANCER. Oh, my God. Let me just assure you that not being able to breathe? SUCKS. Totally disappointing. Totally.”  
“A hamartia?” she asked, the cigarette still in her mouth. She tightened her jaw. She had a hell of a jawline, unfortunately.  
“A fatal flaw.” I explained, turning away from her. I stepped toward the curb, leaving Carmilla Karnstien behind me, and then I heard a car start down the street. It was Dad. He’d been waiting for me to, like, make friends or whatever.  
I felt this weird mix of disappointment and anger welling up inside me. I don’t even know what the feeling was, really, just that there was a lot of it, and I wanted to smack Carmilla Karnstein and also replace my lungs with lungs that didn’t suck at being lungs. I was standing with my converse on the very edge of the curb, the oxygen tank ball-and-chaining in the cart by my side, and right as my dad pulled up, I felt a hand grab mine.  
I yawned my hand free but turned back to her.  
“They don’t kill you unless you light them,” she said as Dad arrived at the curb. “And I’ve never lit one. It’s a metaphor, see: You put the killing thing right between your teeth, but you don’t give it the power to do its killing.”  
“It’s a metaphor,” I said, dubious. Dad was just idling.  
“It’s a metaphor,” she said.  
“You choose your behaviors based on their metaphorical resonances….” I said.  
“Oh, yes.” She smiled. The big, goofy, real smile. “I’m a big believer in metaphor, cutie.”  
I turned to the car. Tapped on the window. It rolled down. “I’m going to a movie with Carmilla Karnstein,” I said. “Please record the next several episodes of the Doctor Who marathon for me.”


End file.
